iRobot And Willow Garage CEOs On The Business Of Robots

It is a fertile time for robots in the U.S. with academics like Virginia Tech’s Dennis Hong developing more sophisticated bots and promoting open-source robotics. But will any of these robots be commercially produced and make money for their producers?

Colin Angle is somewhat skeptical. As chief executive of Roomba-maker iRobot, which has spent more than 20 years designing commercial robots, Angle has a well-honed sense of the market. Angle sees a proliferation of opportunity for robots in areas like videoconferencing and healthcare. And he is confident in iRobot’s core categories of domestic service robots and military robots. But he also carefully distinguishes between prototype robots incubated in an academic lab and robots that are simple and hardy enough to function in anyone’s home.

IRobot’s domestic robots fall into the latter category. The various generations of its vacuum-cleaning robot, Roomba, have sold six million units since its 2002 introduction. Robot vacuums now make up about 10% of premium (more than $200) vacuum sales in North America. The Massachusetts-based company, which went public in 2005, expects to generate $400 to $450 million in revenues this year.

Angle believes robotics will grow intoa “double-digit or even triple-digit billion dollar industry” over time. He says the key to fostering a thriving robotics industry in the U.S. is simple: create a robot that delivers more value than it costs to buy, and design it to be used by 10 million people (an audience far greater than the perhaps 10 people that might work on a research robot).

Silicon Valley company Willow Garage, which has produced a free open-source operating system for robots (ROS) since 2007, recently branched into robot hardware. It too would like millions of people to adopt its products. At $400,000, its high-end, human-sized robot, PR2, is far beyond reach for most consumers, however. (Buyers with a “proven track record in the open-source world” can purchase the bot for $280,000.)